AI Art, Good or Bad? A (hopefully) nuanced take on the subject.
wow, OK...I haven't posted in a long while, but with all the recent AI drama going on, I felt I needed to voice some concerns, and bring up some perhaps controversial thoughts and opinions.
I feel a lot of the discussion so far has been either based on fear-mongering or naive short-term thinking.
We pretty much have two sides right now, The deniers, taking the "Cars only gave horses new jobs" approach to the situation, which is technically true, but there are also a lot fewer horses around.
Then we have the other group: which is basically, and perhaps rightly so, terrified their artwork is being used without their permission, and that they might lose their jobs in the process.
Honestly, I dont know where I stand personally, but here are my two cents so far:
1. Resistance is futile. AI art is here, and can not be un-invented.
Going down the path of protesting, banning, and working against AI art seems like a long, slippery road that will eventually lead nowhere. In the end, AI art is here, and will, at some capacity be here from now on. We should probably try to come to terms with that.
2. However, I don't think it's ethical to go through other people's catalogs of artwork without their permission to use for AI models either. Here we should probably try to take a stand on a legal level in some way or another.
3. Our response so far, as a community has been very unprofessional. I dont think statements like; "AI art is not real art", or "people who use it are despicable" are not very fruitfull pillars to stand on. If anything, it signals to people outside the community that we are emotional, irrational, and much easier to dismiss in a courtroom or any other serious forum where real change could actually happen. This is of course not everyone, and there are definitely people out there trying to have a nuanced discussion on the subject, but unfortunately, they are far and between compared to the majority of arguments I see out there.
If change is something we want as a community, the way we are currently approaching this feels very fear-based, and taking a step back to separate and compartmentalize our opinions seems very much needed. Basically, "AI is not real art" is a very different discussion than "It will take our jobs" and should very much be treated as two completely separate issues in my opinion.
4. Another aspect I think a lot of people miss in this discussion is where this is going long-term. I hear a lot of people say things like "Don't worry, AI art will never be good enough to replace humans". This statement, though maybe comforting, is objectively false. Just looking at the progress AI art has made in less than a year, it's very apparent AI art will very soon not only be as good as us, but better.
This does not mean AI art is worth more. We still play chess, and even though computers can do it better, we still weight-lift, we still paint after the invention of the camera, and so on. Accepting AI will be better, or at least just as good is not the same as saying it's worth more. It might be, but it doesn't have to be unless we give it credit for it.
5. There will most likely be fewer jobs for artists in the future. Junior positions will go first, leaving art directors with smaller teams, that use AI to block out the majority of the "grunt work" in the studio pipelines. Yes, there will be new job opportunities as well, as "AI prompt generators, or AI touch-uppers or whatever we end up calling them" Indie game developers will now be able to produce more and better-looking art with smaller teams, and opportunities for solo games, art projects, movies, etc. will increase.
The end sum of jobs will be fewer, just like cars replaced horses. This however is nothing new, as humanity is clearly going in this direction anyway. this will be a global issue, probably within our lifetime. where not only our jobs, but almost all jobs will be replaced by robots/AI.
In short: AI art is here, and It will definitely stay, whether we like it or not, we should try to come to terms with that. It will soon be better than us, and I predict at least 20% of our jobs will be replaced by AI in 10 years, if not sooner. We are currently flailing around like an angry child having a tantrum, and if we don't take control over our narrative, our opportunity to affect change is slowly going to disappear as corporations and policymakers will start to ignore us.
With that, Im very curious what the rest of you guys think. Maybe being angry and rioting is exactly what we need right now to make our voices heard? maybe I'm too pessimistic about our future, or maybe I have missed the point entirely?
You tell me, because I honestly don't know where I stand on this thing yet.
Okay, that ended up longer than expected, sorry about that xD
Replies
This is my take on AI as well. Claims of "cheating" or denial of AI having any sort of value does nothing to help artists.
(I still really want to see AI text and voice generation in games for NPCs though)
What jobs does it replace besides concept art though?
I cannot get consistent enough results from it to produce basic icons for a survival game. Like, it's totally hit or miss what you get from it, which isn't very helpful doing a job on a schedule. I'd love to put it to good use, but I haven't been able to find much use for it as an indie dev making a 3d game.
I think this goes back to short vs long-term thinking. Even if we expect a linear curve of progress, which is pretty pessimistic, I don't think any position could be considered "safe from replacement" in 10 years' time. we have already seen the early stages of generated 3d models, tileable textures, and now even code.
It won't be long until AI has its tendrils sunk into pretty much every step of the digital entertainment pipeline.
The "cat is out of the bag" position is IMHO a rather short-sighted and somewhat unimaginative admission of defeat in regards to the way current models are using data from non-public domain images, without obtaining any license from the artists who got scraped.
One could very well imagine a situation where providers of AI-trained generators (for images, music, text, 3d models ...) would be legally obliged to state whether a model has been trained on public domain images and/or images that they explicitly acquired the rights to use. This is one of the many practical things that could very well be done today, and would solve a major part of the current problem. Similarly, it could be made illegal to publish an AI-powered generator without explicitly giving access to the entirety of the training data. There is no gray area there, and no reliance on tech to enforce it.
Of course there is no way to know in advance by how much the output would differ (although it's obvious that the generator wouldn't have a clue how to spit out a "Cyberpunk anime city skyline, Trending on Artstation") ... but it doesn't matter really.
Obviously there is no way to know what the next controversy would be - as even under such constraints, AI generators trained on public domain data could still be perceived as a threat. But that's another story really.
My two main problem with AI art.
The "cat is out of the bag" position is IMHO a rather short-sighted and somewhat unimaginative admission of defeat in regards to the way current models are using data from non-public domain images, without obtaining any license from the artists who got scraped.
What license should this be? Don't stare at me CC 2.0 ? ^^
I think we discussed this part more than once now. There is no copyright violation at any point. Proof: the AI is now in the wild for three months and more. And there is not a single lawsuit. Now guess why :)
It's because not a single grain of the original image is used. Even when AI produces similar images in some cases. It uses the style. Nothing more, nothing less. A chair in style of Van Gogh will surely look similar to what Van Gogh would have painted. But never equal. That's the whole idea of the AI.
Looking at an public available image and then use its style is simply not forbidden. No matter under what license this image itself stands. And analyzing the art of other people is what people does since art exists. We had a whole industry in the 19th century around similar looking images with the same sujet.
I think the copyright issues of the training data is an interesting and problematic area, but people and companies are going to make their own datasets. If Star Wars wants a new rebel ship that fits within their universe, they can have an AI fed with their tens of thousands of pieces of concept art, movie stills, merch, renders, etc, generate 1000 images over night or instantly on a network, and give it to a concept artist to flesh out the ideas the director likes best. That's still going to happen. If someone wants to make an AI on their personal computer that scraps and tags images off the internet, they'll do that and share the models. I don't think there's a practical way to stop it.
Well Napster was out for quite a while before the lawsuits came rolling. And the world didn't need the DMCA either - until we did. It takes a while for laws to catch up to new tech.
A single artist dedicating their life to imitate Van Gogh is flattering. But AI that can do this in a matter of seconds with every artist on the planet both dead and alive without their permission, feels like something different to me. It's legal for now, but SHOULD it be?
Wrong straw man. Napster provided copyrighted material. It was illegal from the beginning. They just thought they come through with it. And your hurt feelings doesn't matter for the law.
Fact is, there is no law and no existing copyright broken by AI. Proof: the AI is in the wild for months, and not a single lawsuit has started.
I believe the stance on AI comes to a head at the luddite's crossroad, you will ether side with the group that supports technological progress or revolts to disable it.
I wonder if they swing their luddists hammer also against Photoshop then ...
impossible to regulate huh. this will likely move the hands of many providers and websites to enforce this.
Now that's plain crazy :D
I think the one thing that is missing from the people thinking only in "tech terms" is the fact that just because something is now possible to do, doesn't mean that it is "too late to stop it" and that it is the new normal. For instance in France there is a law from 2017 that stipulates that a photograph of a person used in advertising needs to have a written mention that it has been touched up if it was. The fact that liquify and the clone brush exist does not matter - the law is simply there to enforce the will of the people to not get unknowingly subjected to touched up photos without knowing about it. Similarly, just because research could be made on human cloning, doesn't mean that it can go unregulated. And so on.
Of course everyone can try to bypass the law for whatever reason, and of course no law is perfect and is subject to interpretations. But there is no need for some crazy bLocKcHaIn or wEbThReE tech to authenticate if a picture as not being photoshopped to erase fat rolls - the law just needs to exist, and then if gets violated then it can lead to an investigation.
I can see it being used credibly as a inspirational, concept tool, ive seen some pretty damn nice and amazingly creative things done with it.
Of course it will be horribly abused and honestly at least right now it with enough convolutions just like any machine ai art starts becoming samey and repetitive, but for every millionth dud i feel like it does have some real power to be a very usefull tool to inspire more creativity
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But why should we stop it?
I cannot remember that i had so much fun with a graphical tool since many years. I definitely don't want to give it away anymore. When you don't want to use it then this is your decision. And you can already do this without to forbid me my favourite tool.
The tech is here, nobody will take it away. But there are a few things that need to be fixed.
The first and foremost would be making sure how its sourcing its inputs. Using an open source library that was made to study, in a commercial sense will have to stop or there will have to be systems in place to compensate.
I feel like as an artust asking for AI images to go away is like asking for cars to go away as a horse carriage driver back in the days. The times without AI supported Art is over, it will not come back.
But it doesn't mean it can and should not be regulated. But the topic is so big I don't see how a platform like ie. Artstation alone could tackle it.
I don't see how they could enforce a ban on AI art, the easiest they can do is an optional Tag that AI images should use, and people not interested filtering those out, treating them differently on artstations end.
Atm images made by AI are often simple to recognize, but that might not be the case forever. A forced on watermark that the suppliers of those platforms have to use, can solve that issue.
The other thing they can do, is give an opt-in function, marking all existing pieces opt-out. If the image ends up in a database used for profit, there are then ways to go against that.
That wouldnt solve automatic scraping as a whole, and certainly not manual scraping. But it's a step in the right direction
The first and foremost would be making sure how its sourcing its inputs.
Why? There is no law that forbids to look at images and to analyze them. This is what artists does since art exists.
there is no law, does not mean there can not be one? there is no law that says ai art has to get marked as such, until there is.
and yes lawsuits between artists and artists or artists and companies exist, plagiarism is a thing.
Sure it can. But for what reason? And what exactly do you want to put under punishment? Looking at public available images? Painting in the style of a living artist? That's all things that human artists does too.
Imho the real reason why AI is hated is because it is a competitor for traditional artists. And because of hurt feelings that somebody completely clueless can now type in some text, press a button, and make better images than somebody who works at such an image for months in the traditional way. While in reality is simply not true. You need some special skills to get out the best of AI. Most of the users comes from traditional art. And some things are still not achievable. I already mentioned the ladybug. Mission impossible in SD.
But being competition is nothing illegal. Like it is not illegal to take a picture with a camera instead of painting it in oil. Or to use the AI background filling in Photoshop. Or the AI solution in animation software like Cascadeur. Or a robot in a factory. And so on. AI and automation has long taken over in areas whre you don't even think about. And technical progression was always part of the game. Somebody rememers the time where we needed to fake GI with colored lights? Hey, why not forbid render engines that comes with GI ? And do the lighting with fake light bulbs again. This has cost so much jobs ...
What you do here is to search for a reason to get rid of this new competitor. I can understand this part. I understand the hurt feelings. I understand the fear to become worthless and jobless in the nearer future. But i don't share it. I love the AI tools like i always loved the progression. They are now around since months, and the graphical world is still not collapsed. And in human history progression has always (okay, let's say in most cases) made the world richer. Not poorer. You always win new jobs where you loose old ones. This was true even before AI. Before Zbrush you needed to sds model the fine details.
Now we have the job of an AI artist already. The skill to take out the best result of the AI. Which is already a art at its own. And there is enough other artist work left. You might still need to do some post processing. Color Grading and stuff. You might still need to do some corrective painting. And so on.
So may i repeat my question? For what legal reason do you want to put the usage of AI under punishment?
To mark AI work with a watermark to make it useless may work in China under a totalitarian system. But not in the free world.
i am not trying to get rid of this competitor, as i know i can not.
I do what i always do. make nice art and hope it will all be good, that there will be people who we work with who value art done by hand and that there will be people who will not. there are already clients who we do not work with for various reasons, thats fine.
i have no hurt feelings, maybe because the damn database doesn't have my work in it!!!!111 ;)
i do think there is a lot of value in AI stuff, there are people who would have NEVER commisioned to an artist, who have great ideas (not just ideaguys getting nothing done ever besides lots of talking) and now have the possibility to tell their stories. Use the tool by all means, as an artist or studio, train it yourself, but doing it on the backs of thousands who have not even been ask, is unethical at the least.
you already admitted that there are ethical reasons why it's not in a great state, so why refuse to make it more ethical?
Because imho ethical is not equal legal. And i don't share your ethical view at AI. I just can understand it to some degree. For me it is simply nothing that should be regulated as long as it does not violate laws.
The hurt feelings wasn't especially aimed at you. I just follow other discussions too. And there it definitely matters that "this clueless moron" just types in "some text" ...
that's fair, but laws are an ever changing construct, they get adjusted, they get adapted.
most of the times too slow.
but law is nothing that is written in stone and can never be touched, often enough they get changed in the favor of the people with the big money, so yeah there is always a risk that this goes sideways.
Sure. But there is always a reason for a new law. And i ask for this reason. Why should for AI be forbidden what is allowed for humans? And what especially should be forbidden? :)
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This has already been highlighted by both Pior and Neox, but just because something is legal now does not mean that makes it right, nor that it will be legal forever. Laws change and update all the time together with new inventions and with society. There will most likely be many things regarding AI that we need to iron out from a legal point of view going forward, not just with the art side of things.
however, I think you raise a good point, what could you actually argue is the legal ground here? should AI not be able to look at images as references while humans can? Im not saying that's right or wrong, but its, unfortunately not a very strong argument, and I don't think that will hold up very long in a practical discussion.
I would also like to highlight a point made by ZAcD. They mentioned Disney and Star Wars as an example earlier. If Disney uses its own library of their own copyrighted work to create more Star Wars art, would that be considered okay? they own that database after all.
If so, is the real question about creating approved libraries for AI models to use? obviously, its going to be really hard to prove or disapprove if the images they use are approved or not, but I feel like that's at least somewhere where you could draw a defined legal line that's not up to interpretation.
Yes, i search for the legal reasoning here. For the reason to declare parts of the AI to be illegal :)
EDIT, for example, the chinese reasoning for the punishment is that AI can create deep fake images. But they don't forbid it. They just make sure that Ai generated images are marked as such, to prevent deep fakes. I personally think that this will help nothing, since the baddies who wants to create deep fake will not care about watermarks ...
I actually think watermarks is a pretty good idea. It doesn't fringe on censorship or denial of services. of course, people can simply not use them or remove them, the same way people do now. but saying it will help nothing is going too far I think.
Gun laws, copyrights, banning of drugs, murder being illegal, etc definitely work. Of course not to 100%, but to a reasonable point that doing nothing would be far worse.
But a watermark will make the images useless. And so it is a de facto ban for users and the art created with it. For what reason? Deep fake like in China? The main concern here so far was that "these basterds uses my data", which they don't. Not a single grain of copyright is touched. They use it for training by simply looking at it. Completely legal.
And like some others here before, you put the AI in the same row than murders, drugs, file sharing etc. . What part of AI is so illegal in your eyes that users are not allowed to use it anymore? Based at what law?
Sorry for being so penetrant here. But this is imho the whole dilemma. That there is nothing illegal at AI, but some people eagerly wants to declare it to be illegal, and ethically and morally reprehensible. It simply isn't.
why would they be useless? it doesnt even have to be a human readable watermark. machines are perfect at hiding information in some off pixels here and there. or even with visible watermarks, it doesnt have to be crossing the entire image.
if its not murder, how about a seatbelt? man have people been upset when their freedom was taken to drive a car without.
or piors example in france, where you have to tell that a picture was manipulated and is in fact not a real photo.
that is very very close.
@Tiles
legality, ethics, morality, etc - these are not trees, rocks, air, or dirt. They are make believe concepts. If majority of people say AI art is bad, then it's bad. If people who have power make a law to say you can't use for reasons, then it's illegal. No point splitting hairs over these concepts because they don't point to anything measurable.
It is true that AI is making the art the same way people do. It looks at shit, copies it, changes a bit.
But AI does it billions time faster. So, it's the same issue as factory machines replacing some peoples jobs. A robot arm does the same shit a person does, except a billion times faster. And you don't have to pay as much for it.
If job loss happens at a slow pace, it is okay. People might find something else to do. If it happens too fast, or too much, eventually only thing left for people to do is drugs. It does become a big problem when there is millions of people and every meaningful thing for them to do is taken away.
Most people cannot simply learn how to pick up some new, way more complicated skill. Not everybody is an 18 year kid from affluent background with nothing but time.
Life is already too hard for artist so I don't see good reason to be opposed to sensible regulations to at least set precedent for protection of artist work.
Personally, I'd love to leverage AI art as much as I can but so far I can't find much utility for it.
and besides the point of artists being scraped, lets ignore it. how about medical data that should not be in these databases, or revenge porn? how could a company use this stuff comercially, fully knowing this shit is in the database, feeds the generate and can come back up?
@Tiles But we've already shown examples of pixel-per-pixel (more or less) copies of prominent images, in one of the other AI threads. If "The main concern here so far was that "these basterds uses my data", which they don't. Not a single grain of copyright is touched. They use it for training by simply looking at it. Completely legal." then how do these exact copies exist, as shot out from an AI?
And how is that different than just, say, copying an image and resaving it out? Or copying an image, running an oil paint filter on it, and calling it my own?
The fact is, sometimes it shoots out things that exist already, and so long as that happens, I don't buy the whole "no data is used" argument, because it comes down to semantics, not facts. It's all data. An AI looking at an image is nothing but data.
Also I still haven't seen you address that a computer analyzing is fundamentally different than a person looking. Especially when the computer is analyzing in order to regurgitate art based upon what it analyzes. It's sole function is that, and does so much more directly than a human artist, who looks at art for all sorts of reasons. I think the idea that a computer analyzing and a human looking are the same is a very technocentric worldview; and is the source of a lot of the "moral ambiguity" with regards to AI and art. Of course this all comes down to differences in philosophy, but.
BTW you all - some of you may remember that Artsation initially came around because CGHub closed down, and people needed an alternative.
Don't be lazy this time around - make sure that you have all your images backed up, and also keep in mind that creating a basic online portfolio only takes rudimentary web authoring skills that can be learned over a weekend.
CGHub... so much potential, and sadly it was so short lived. Artstation has been missing the qualities that made it shine since inception. Totally agree with the "set your own stuff up" bootcamp. Even if it is longer than a weekend for some, it's still worth the powerful knowledge of owning and maintaining your own domain, IP (original and licensed contributions), with logged evidence of scraped data that you can actively block.
@Tiles But we've already shown examples of pixel-per-pixel (more or less) copies of prominent images, in one of the other AI threads.
Yes, you can make content that looks similar. The more famous an image is, the closer AI will come to it. But it is not pixel by pixel. And you can do similar images with Photoshop or Krita too. Shall we forbid Photoshop or Krita now? And you can also take pictures of existing images with a camera. Shall we now forbid cameras? And you can of course also copy n paste images. Shall we now forbid copy n paste? You can with every artists tool break copyright. But you can also create valid and legal art with all these tools and methods. It's still the artist who decides what content he wants to create. Legal, or illegal content.
And how is that different than just, say, copying an image and resaving it out? Or copying an image, running an oil paint filter on it, and calling it my own?
There is none. This is by the way my argument. AI is just another art tool, like Photoshop, like ZBrush, like a pencil with some oil color at it. And when you ask for a plumber with red cap, blue dress and a mustache in comic style, then also AI will create a super mario character. Like paiting it in Photoshop, like copy n paste, like any other method that allows you to create art. They all allow you to create copyrighted content too. And it's the responsiblity of the artist to care of the copyright, not the fault of Photoshop, Max, or the brush etc.
and besides the point of artists being scraped, lets ignore it.
How ? Where? Where is the crime here?
how about medical data that should not be in these databases, or revenge porn? how could a company use this stuff comercially, fully knowing this shit is in the database, feeds the generate and can come back up?
The media is NOT in the database. And never is. That's the whole idea of AI, it learns the concept. There is simply no pixel information in the weight. There wouldn't be any space for it anyways. The smallest SD weight is 4 gb. The media is in the INTERNET. Shall we forbid the internet?
If even, then the by the AI learned concept is in the database. And the AI solutions and their makers tries to filter out such content as good as they can. And this already at crawling the content.
For my flavour this filtering goes already ways too far by the way. Art should never be limited. There is a reason why a special fork of Stable Diffusion for adult content only exists. But this shows on the other hand that there is some demand. Like there is demand for porn in general. Sex is one of the fundamental human forces.
Also I still haven't seen you address that a computer analyzing is fundamentally different than a person looking.
That a computer works more accurate is no crime.
But AI does it billions time faster.
Also this is no crime. Efficiency is why computers and AI exists.
If majority of people say AI art is bad,
Do they? Why is AI so popular then? ;)
I know that i play the devils advocate here, i understand that you FEEL scraped. But a feeling is no crime. And i still have the feeling that most of you still don't know what you ask for here in the name of burning the AI witch. I am still in the state to find out why it should be a witch at all. I still look for the crime and the law that is broken. And the answer is still: none, there is no crime. And no witch. Just a witch hunt ...
"The media is in the INTERNET"
the database behind most of these tools is LAION B, which is full of stuff that should not be in there and should not be used outside of its original intent, to study, to experiment, not used in a commercial sense. Which AI tools is currently scraping the internet itself?
And LAION crawls the internet. That's where the data comes from.
And what do you mean with "that should not be in there?" Again, there is not a single pixel stored in this database. No copyright violation, no data abuse, nothing. When you think that LAION does something illegal, then please report it. But you better prove it. False accusations does not help.
Just something to think about. If someone feed the whole stackoverflow to one of this algorithms maybe programmers should be concern as well its not just as poor artist
Also there are new type of artist "Ai Artists" who are selling their creations as NFTs for crypto so random generators feed NFTs and everyone make money of thin air
how can you search the database and find your medical information in form of pictures, if the pictures arent stored?
and unless conntected to the name, which now is absolutely a breach of personal information, said artist wouldnt have been able to find her records inside Laion? do i really have to search for the articles with the revenge porn images now? this stuff is in there and out there.
how can you search the database and find your medical information in form of pictures, if the pictures arent stored?
How can you paint a picture if the image isn't stored in your brain? It both has the same answer. You learned the concept. This is what AI makes so fascinating. It learned what grass is, what a face is, and still struggles with hands like most real artist too ...
I have also a question for you. How would you store terabytes over terabytes of image material in a 4gb file? I would love to know this algorithm. It would make me rich! It is technically impossible to compress all this data to such a small file. not even with a lossy compression format. So could you please finally stop the false claim that a AI weight comes with images? Thanks.
And regarding the link, LAION is the training material, not the weights. You simply mix the training images with the AI weights. The article explicitely speaks about the data set. The training material where the AI learns the concept, by looking at public available material. Which points onto the real problem. How the heck could this data ever become public?
The makers of the AI tools did and does not store this images in the weights. It is as told technically impossible, and not how AI works. And crawling and looking at public available images is not forbidden. This is simply this kind of false information that i meant with false accusations.
I've said something like this in the other thread.
The way I see it, as soon as you use a load of disney cartoons as training data for your disney style AI twitter pfp generating app you've made money off disney's IP and they ought to be able to sue your ass for it in the same way they can sue your ass if you put mickey mouse on a tshirt.
Legislation that regulates what is allowed in a dataset with or without authorisation is probably the only sensible way to handle this.
Proving something was used in a dataset isn't a solved problem but it's being worked on so it's fairly safe to assume you'll be able to reverse image search a robot at some point soon.
It won't stop the kind of people who already sell knockoff disney pyjamas and are presumably already deep into selling AI generated ripoff artwork but at least it'll be explicitly illegal and we can go back to the status quo of having our stuff ripped off in china rather than the US
This does not work. Since you can train the AI with these images anyways. And the dataset is free available content of the internet.
Nobody would ever think of limiting Photoshop to draw just vertical lines. Why do you want to do this with AI? It always boils down that you want to regulate the tool and all its users instead of the criminals who abuses the tool. Why? We have already enough laws. The copyright is more than sufficient to deal with this art tool too. The artist, the one wo publishes the images is responsible to care of copyright. Not the brush.
We go in circles ^^
At the end of the day, all it takes to understand the infringement aspect of it (which, with a little bit of perspective gained over the last few weeks, is actually clear as day) is to replace the anthropomorphic term "learning" by the much more straightforward term "using".
It could be rather easily demonstrated by simply building two models : one using a certain amount of images and metadata + the Afghan Girl, and one without. And then the software just need to be prompted with "Afghan Girl" and the results compared. The distinction between the model using the picture without any consent and the one which isn't would be obvious.
As a matter of fact I would assume that it is much easier to demonstrate than what the art thieves are implying. And I believe there is not even any need for any new law, as copyright law already covers it all. The tipping point would only be the interpretation of the court as to whether or not the theft constitutes fair use. And at the end of the day the thing that determines what fair use is ... is the consensus around artistic practice. Artists are ok with showing their work without any watermark or restriction to access for other humans to appreciate it for free and get inspired ; they are not ok with the images being used without consent in an image generation algorithm. That's all it needs for it to be put into law if needed eventually.
As for going in circles : well, arguments for or against (either in good faith or as a devil's advocate) only go in circles if nothing new is being added to the conversation. So, after a point has been made, there really isn't much point repeating it ad nauseum. I think everyone is interested in hearing new ideas and original arguments, just not the same old Photoshop analogy (which IMHO barely applies here to begin with ...).
This is what i mean with we go in circles. The photoshop analogy fits perfectly. And the false accusation of Ai being an art thief remains a false accusation. Again, the AI is in the wild for months, and we haven't seen a single lawsuit so far. Since there is simply no license breach.
I highlighted the important part.
This is the next big Industrial Revolution; I don't think we can stop it and a huge chunks of beginner/intermediate craftsman and artisans are goign to have hard time mastering their craft without it's use.
It's essentially coming for everything and is the big leap we somewhat were all awaiting for in the digital age; the ULTIMTE TOOL that literally archive severything into data sets, processes them on an accuracy basis then gives you the best information/render/result from billions of info.
From medical advice, coding algorhithm, anything. A friend of mine was writing a Google Addon to download playlist from a certain set of streaming website and was quite excited about it. I just used ChatGP OpenAi to do it and got something pretty solid.
In a world of cheap endless digital consumption, content and information delivery is really about to change how we understand and process creativity.
I can't figure out how our forefathers would look at us or this and feel optimistic for us.
If anything, this pushes me to fruther appreciate classical methods of Art Production similar on how the endless Digital Pop Soulless crap has mad eme appreciate 1940s-1980s legends further.
I also will never believe/doubt any picture I see now on social media; everything was already biased and photoshopped, its gonna be worse now.
Three words you will never see in the future: "Respected AI Artist". History of course will respect the great artists of the past. But in the future the respect will be reserved for the ones who created the AI, not the ones who pay a monthly fee to use it. It has basically granted everyone with super powers. And spare me the Photoshop analogies - no reasonable person can say they are equivalent.
Folks using AI: Enjoy impressing your friends and family with your "art" now, because once this hits the mainstream public consciousness the jig is up.
This site has been trying to catch/study and review all of the image that have been archived and collected into the databases to train the various open AI.
You can use it to see if your work was used somehow.
Meanwhile, on the Artstation store :
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/OglYo/300-male-head-sculpt-references-for-artist?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace
These are obviously AI-generated renders, probably prompted as "digital sculpt, realistic, trending on Artstation, in the style of xxxx". And since the AI model is using copyrighted images, this is basically infringing on thousands ...
[edit] For the morbidly curious, here is some more :
ok - three points:
1: I proposed regulation of the datasets used, not the tools - this sort of licensing is already covered by law.
2: I dont necessarily agree that copyright laws cover this use case sufficiently but I do believe it would be relatively trivial to close a few loopholes - Pior may be onto something with using vs learning for example.
3: you cannot stop 'criminals' doing things in places where what they're doing isn't a crime so chasing them is a non-starter.
These are obviously AI-generated renders, probably prompted as "digital sculpt, realistic, trending on Artstation, in the style of xxxx". And since the AI model is using copyrighted images, this is basically infringing on thousands ...
You claim again that there is a copyright breach. But where is it? To create images in the style of artist xxx is still no copyright breach. It becomes a copyright breach when the content is equal to an existing original, and/or uses design or brand that is under copyright. And i don't see this here. And there must be somebody claiming the copyright breach. And go to court with it. The original author. You cannot accuse an image to be stolen without to have somebody who claims to be the original author. And who can prove it then.
I agree that this part may become a bit cumbersome in the future, with the masses of available and possible created images*. But law is law. And when you want to change this law, then you need a good reason for it. "I want to kill my competitor" is understandable, but is no good reason for a new law.
*Maybe we will see a AI for that in the future :)
1: I proposed regulation of the datasets used, not the tools - this sort of licensing is already covered by law.
Yes, and the law of the countries where LAION, the database which is used to train the AI, resides, allows such crawling and the use to train AI with it.
2: I dont necessarily agree that copyright laws cover this use case sufficiently but I do believe it would be relatively trivial to close a few loopholes - Pior may be onto something with using vs learning for example.
Good luck forbidding learning ^^
It's a difficult matter. Why should it be allowed to learn for humans, and forbidden for AI? This is still the point that is completely unclear to me. AI does nothing else than humans does. Just a bit more efficient and faster.
3: you cannot stop 'criminals' doing things in places where what they're doing isn't a crime so chasing them is a non-starter.
This is the kind of law that already exists. Copyright :)